China’s manufacturing sector continued to suffer from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic in March, as data released on Friday showed factory gate prices contracted at a faster pace last month, reported the South China Morning Post.
The producer price index, reflecting the prices that factories charge wholesalers for their products, dropped 1.5% year-on-year last month, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed.
That was worse than the 0.4% fall in February and above the 1.1% contraction tipped in a Bloomberg survey of analysts.
Meanwhile, China’s consumer price index rose 4.3% from a year earlier, falling sharply from a 5.2% gain in February, according to the NBS. Analysts polled by Bloomberg had expected an inflation rate of 4.9%.